~ A blog about IQ, the brain & success

Tag Archives: Pumpkin Person

Recently a new commentator named “alcoholicwisdom” (cool name btw) mentioned the wisdom of crowds. This is based on a famous experiment where a crowd of people were asked to estimate the weight of an animal and while most people were wrong, the average of all the estimates was close to perfectly accurate. This happened because error in both directions often cancels out.

Alcoholicwisdom thought it would be interesting to apply the wisdom of crowds to guessing IQ, so what better application of this concept then to have my readers guess my IQ. The best way to do this is in an anonymous poll since many people will be more honest when voting by secret ballot.

Please only vote if you feel you’ve read enough of my posts or comments to have a rough idea of how intelligent I might be (no point voting if this is the only post you’ve read). Also please take the poll seriously and answer honestly, and not based on whether you personally like or dislike me. Also, one of my readers actually gave me some IQ tests, so he’s not allowed to vote, because he has objective scores, and the whole point of this exercise is to observe the distribution of subjective IQ estimates. Also please vote BEFORE you read any of the comments, because the wisdom of crowds only works if each member of the crowd votes independently and is not influenced by the opinions of others.

I know I said my next post would be about heritability, but there’s been some major news for this blog and I must take a moment to thank the Lion of the Blogosphere, who by writing about me yesterday on his wildly popular blog, drove the number of unique visitors and page views to far and away the highest level in the entire history of either of my blogs. And then by blogging about me again today, drove the web traffic far higher than even yesterday, and the day’s only half over!

The Lion is an extremely bright and talented blogger and can very effortlessly attract and maintain a huge readership through witty and insightful social observations and by writing succinctly and clearly. It’s a huge honor that he would so generously share his enormous readership with my little blog two days in a row. I read and comment on his blog constantly because he writes about IQ, success and social class, and does so with an understanding of the Ivy League elitism in New York city (where he lives) which is quite fascinating and horrifying for a Canadian like myself (no such caste system exists here in Canada).

I was honored to discover that Professor Bruce Charlton had written the following:

…a new blog called Brain Size…Which is shaping-up to be a valuable contribution to intelligence research.

The author, Herr Professor Doktor Pumpkinperson, has the attributes of honesty, persistence (this especially), intelligence and a refreshing disinclination to take offense at the criticism of others!

I greatly appreciate the compliment, especially coming from a man of such towering intelligence and integrity, and one who is so eminent that his ideas are discussed by the world’s most influential newspaper. I don’t think this blog is worthy of praise from such a high quality source, but hopefully it will become more worthy over time.

Charlton is enormously respected for his original thinking and willingness to courageously challenge the scientific consensus on many issues, and strongly defend the right of others to do so too, thus playing an invaluable role in both academia and the blogosphere.

I can not recommend his blogs strongly enough, especially Intelligence, Personality and Genius. Although I disagree with some of his ideas, his blogs have been a treasure trove of insightful and informed fascinating observations. He discusses many of the same topics I do, but does so with much greater knowledge and understanding and from a multidisciplinary perspective that very few people have. It’s very rare for that quality of writing to be so freely available and accessible to anyone with internet access, so I strongly recommend one take advantage of it.

One of the most defining life changing moments of my life came in high school, when I under-performed on a grade 11 chemistry test. Suffering from sour grapes, I ranted about the chemistry test being a poor measure of intelligence. My chemistry teacher approached to ask “Can you tell me anything in chemistry that doesn’t require intelligence?”

“All the mindless memorizing we have to do,” I replied.

“You know when you talk about intelligence, there are so many different parts to it, ” he said wisely. “It’s memorization, it’s pattern recognition, it’s…”

“I think intelligence is just how quickly you can process information,” I said, cutting him off, emboldened by knowledge of Arthur Jensen’s reaction time studies.

“No,” he corrected me. “That’s only one part of it!….If you want a single umbrella to cover ALL of intelligence….” he said, slowly, carefully, spreading out his arms as far as they would reach to convey the utter vastness of the entity he was describing, “then it’s the ability to adapt; to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage. That’s really what intelligence is”

Since childhood I’ve been fascinated by IQ testing and horror films. At first I tried to merge both subjects into a single blog because they both deal with psychology, but I’m starting to realize that’s not the best fit, so I created this blog for IQ related topics. Some posts however apply to both topics and those posts may appear in both blogs.